


Asimov's Advocate

by rioludoodle



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Androids, Artificial Intelligence, Drama, Gen, Life Model Decoys, Phil Coulson is a Life Model Decoy, Psychological Drama, Tahiti (Agents of SHIELD), Technology
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-05
Updated: 2018-08-05
Packaged: 2019-06-21 21:41:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15566919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rioludoodle/pseuds/rioludoodle
Summary: Nick Fury still needed his right-hand man, and SHIELD had the means to do great and terrible things. An alternate universe in which Project TAHITI did not save Coulson after all.





	Asimov's Advocate

**Author's Note:**

> As great of a dramatic reveal as TAHITI was back in season 1, I was kinda hoping that Phil Coulson was really a Life Model Decoy. 
> 
> This chapter is the first installment of what may or may not develop into a very long project for my personal entertainment. Currently halfway through another installment that isn't much of a direct continuation of this one. If I lose interest in writing what comes next, I'll just mark this fic as complete and abandon it.

Although in retrospect there were a great many events, grand and otherwise, that had hinted at the terrible truth of his situation, it had been the smallest details that ultimately clued him into a feeling a wrongness about his being. The startlingly fast, reflexive dodge of a van door-shaped projectile; the more off than usual taste of instant coffee; the way that exhaustion and physical strain did not seem to reach as bone-deep as he remembered they did before New York. Thoughts of these things nestled in the back of his mind like the seeds of nightmares, yet for each symptom of _differentness_ that he noticed, there had been at least one more that escaped him.

——

_Pilot._

“He can never know the truth,” Maria Hill had said of Coulson.

——

_0-8-4._

When the 0-8-4, the HYDRA weapon from the Incan temple, went off, a number of events occurred. First and foremost, a hole appeared in the side of the plane, and the subsequent loss of cabin pressure resulted in a considerable amount of chaos as SHIELD retook control of the aircraft. Simultaneously and more briefly, however, a handful of machines in the immediate vicinity of the blast, most of them small and unimportant like cell phones and watches, experienced an odd moment of pause.

Satellite-synced clocks that had been accurate to the millisecond lagged approximately .0241 seconds behind their counterparts in other sections of the Bus before being automatically reset. A large calculation being run by Fitzsimmons on some stray personal device ran into an error and started over.

In the midst of a highly volatile situation the likes of which he was trained to remain focused in, Coulson felt like he had blinked and missed something. Every observation, from the careening positions of the enemy combatants to the amount of force trying to tear him out of the plane, indicated that the moment after the 0-8-4 had fired was exactly as it should have been, given what was happening the moment immediately before. Yet somehow, inexplicably, he had the odd inkling that something had been lost.

It felt exactly as if he had just woken up. The there-then-not fog in his head, like the warm, earthy smell of rain after the storm, reminded him of being startled awake from a dream, albeit a dream uncannily resembling his current reality.

An instant, a small fraction of a second, of blankness, of oblivion, of stress-induced haze — that was all that it was, all that it could possibly be. Coulson wrote off the strange sensation almost as soon as it registered with him, and his attention returned to more pressing issues at hand.

——

Coulson was passing through the hanger as Fitzsimmons were explaining — perhaps in more depth than strictly necessary — the logistics of the Slingshot to Skye and Ward. Against his natural inclination to stay on top of the paperwork awaiting him in his office, he slowed, stopped, and retraced his steps to join their small circle under the fluorescent lighting. The sheer, contagious enthusiasm that the BioTech duo brought to the team was uplifting, even in SHIELD’s grisly line of work.

Fitz rambled giddily, “The payload’s maximum velocity is somewhere about 80,000 kilometres per hour, once it escapes Earth’s gravity. It has to get way out there--”

“-past the moon, which is 238,000 miles away,” continued Simmons with a bright smile, “before control of the rocket can be left completely to the onboard computers. With all the satellites and space stations around Earth-”

“-and not to mention weather-”

“-SHIELD always needs to monitor launch windows and trajectories to avoid interfering with their instruments and to keep Slingshot top secret,” she went on to say, “but once it gets past all that, it’s a straightforward leap into the sun.”

“Only 93 million miles,” stated Fitz wryly, “which means the whole trip takes… ah….”

Coulson casually interjected, “1,871 hours. Or 78 days, with a little more rounding.”

With a look of distant awe in her eyes, Skye marveled, “Wait, so that means that the rocket we saw shoot off into space two hours ago — it’s still practically right on top of us.”

Fitz practically glowed. “Exactly. Isn’t that amazing?”

——

_Interlude._

“So,” said Coulson glibly with car keys in his hand and a smile on his lips, “Since we’re stuck refueling again, how about takeout?”

Leaning back in the lounge couch so far as to sink into the cushions, Skye clapped her hands together and declared, “Let’s get Manchu’s! I gotta try that shrimp.”

“You had some of Fitz’s last time, Skye,” pointed out Coulson matter-of-factly.

“I did?” she asked as bewilderment flashed across her face.

“You ordered the vegetable stir-fry,” he clarified, “Ward had pork spring rolls, Simmons had chicken and dumplings, Fitz had the shrimp. Knocked off half the main course options. None of you liked what you had, so you went pot-luck. May refused to share her fish. Ring a bell?”

She made a see-saw gesture with her hand that, while meant to save face, really only got across the message that she did not, in fact, remember how the team’s last adventure with takeout cuisine in this particular city had passed. When she glanced about, she found that Fitz and Ward were her compatriots in confusion; only Simmons seemed to be nodding along with Coulson’s recollection of the meal. Simmons also, however, wore an odd grimace.

Skye glanced past Simmons to where the most mysterious of their bunch was leaning against the staircase. If it wasn’t Skye’s imagination, the laser-focused and unreadable Agent May seemed even more attentive than usual, even slightly concerned. The driver of the Bus noticed her gaze and returned a thin-lipped stare that caused her to avert her eyes. She redirected her attention to Simmons, who seemed about to speak.

Simmons explained, “That dinner was fun for a bit, but Fitz and Skye developed food poisoning later that night.”

“ _Oh_ ,” went Fitz, Skye, and Ward in recognition.

With a meek shrug, Fitz suggested, “Let’s try  a different place this time around, eh?”

Leaping back into the conversation, Coulson stated, “Skye found some alternatives for the next time we were in town. The authentic Korean place near the 1982 Howling Commandos Memorial Bridge was second from the top of the list, as I recall.”

Snorting in amusement, Skye queried, “How on Earth do you remember all this?”

With a dismissive shake of her head, May answered, “Coulson is an anal-retentive fanboy.”

Skye gave a bark of laughter that was echoed by Fitzsimmons across from her. The corners of Ward’s mouth twitched into what was almost a smile.

Coulson shot May an exasperated look that she met with expertly-schooled indifference.

——

_The Well._

After the Berserker Staff was recovered and all was said and done, the no longer so secretly Asgardian professor Elliot Randolph turned his head to look at Coulson. A curious frown settled upon his face. The academic inquisitiveness of his posture and his expression stood incongruously beside the still-damp blood that soaked his clothing.

He appraised Coulson from head to toe and said to the agent, “You know, it’s been a long time since I met a thing like you. I didn’t think that Earth had the technology yet.”

Coulson was flabbergasted. “I’m sorry. What?”

Realization dawned on the professor. Backtracking, he aloofly replied, “Ah. My apologies. It’s not my place to interfere with this planet’s affairs. If it’s any consolation, your kind usually irks me, but you, I actually respect a little."

“Is that supposed to be a ‘thank you’?” asked Coulson in stride. What Randolph said was quite strange, but it could be puzzled over later if he had the time or put down to cultural dissonance. Every Asgardian that he had ever met had been some measure of arrogant, silly, or out of touch.

Randolph shrugged. “Take it as it is.”

——

_The Magical Place._

“This really should be working more effectively than it is,” declared Raina puzzledly as she hovered over the controls of the machine.

Coulson did not know exactly what the thing into which they had placed him was meant to do beyond mess with his head, but he sincerely did not want to find out while Raina and the Clairvoyant’s other minion were still controlling it. He sent the man in the doorway a righteous glower that, given his injured state, likely fell well short of intimidating. A twinge of pain from a scabbed-over cut on his jaw prompted him to cease exercising his small act of rebellion. He did not deign to speak.

“Crank up the machine again, girl,” said the antagonist blocking the exit.

Raina turned and coolly replied, “That would be unsafe for the patient.”

For reasons that he did not understand, Raina’s words brought to Coulson’s mind an image of the beach and his time recovering in Tahiti. He pushed it away; now was not the time for distractions.

A series of events occurred.

There was a near-escape into the desert, as dry and dusty as his ashes someday would be. There was recapture and there was torture, pain whose anticipation was not the worst of it. There was a phone call, short and to the point.

The man, the more hostile but not, in Coulson’s humble opinion, the more disturbed of his two captors, was now dead. It was down to him and Raina and that strange machine, and somehow it worsened the anxiety of his situation to have only the girl in the flower dress in control of his fate.

She needled and wheedled him, her voice calm and soothing and sweet like poisoned honey.

“If you work with me, then this whole thing will be much easier.”

“That’s cliche,” he told her.

“So obstinate,” she smiled pleasantly. “Even when we have common goals. Don’t you want to know what happened in Tahiti?”

Coulson’s knee-jerk response went, “It was a magical—” and he cut himself off before he could finish.

He paused. She waited.

Coulson quietly admitted, “...I keep saying that, and I don’t know why.”

She turned the machine back on, and he climbed in willingly.

He saw Tahiti; he saw flashes of strange vials, of blinding light; he saw an operating theatre. He saw an outraged doctor and a belligerent nurse; he saw the silhouettes of Director Fury and Commander Hill far above it all. He heard whirring and zapping and metallic scurrying: the sharpened steel sounds of the mechanical monster that hovered over his open skull, the device that was easily several orders of magnitude more horrifying than Raina and her machine, the device that operated at SHIELD’s command. He heard his own voice, crying out for death.

“Who ordered this?!”

“It was Director Fury himself.”

He saw darkness; he heard a ringing silence.

.

.

.

Fury’s voice, grave and not at all reassuring: “If you’re sure that he won’t last like this, then I insist we implement the alternative.”

.

.

A strange headset, silver and delicate and full of blinking lights, being brought toward him by a set of shaky hands. The appearance of the headset vaguely reminded him of the very machine he was currently stuck inside of in the real world.

.

Coulson’s team arrived to rescue him. Raina, of course, escaped.

——

He did not have to wait long for Doctor Streiten.

“I know about Tahiti,” Coulson told the SHIELD-sanctioned surgeon.

The good doctor, frozen in place, let out a shuddering breath, “I always knew you would come back to haunt me.”

From the doctor, Coulson received confirmation of what he had already come to suspect: he had been dead for far longer than a mere handful of minutes. Streiten explained with trembling hands the reasoning behind the implanted beachfront memories. He talked about the horror of Coulson’s resurrection and about Fury’s insistence and about his own broken ethics. He would have talked about much more if Coulson had chosen to remain — that much, the agent could see plain on the doctor’s face. But Coulson did not stay to listen; he left as promptly as he had arrived.

He could not explain what drove him to leave so quickly. In retrospect, perhaps some part of his mind already knew what he would hear if he elected to remain. Denial is a powerful thing.

Streiten went off the grid later that very night, but not before a plastic flash drive, a dull, grey thing made distinct only by the presence of a whimsical sticker of a cartoonish apple, found its way into the bundle of field reports delivered to Coulson’s office. Its contents were encrypted, and it would not accept more than four password attempts within twelve hours. Coulson possessed not the slightest inkling what sequence of characters might decode the doctor’s files.

——

_TAHITI._

They were in the Guest House. One of the soldiers guarding the facility was dead. The other was dying, and his last words were to Coulson.

“Are you…Virgil…? I know you…” the man mumbled, “from the Garden….”

“I may have spent some time here before,” Coulson acknowledged.

“Then you know about the timer.”

There was a timer, and it was, of course, attached to explosives. Garrett and Ward stayed behind to disarm it if they could. The team was running under a newly visible deadline.

Without hazard suits or protection of any sort, Coulson and Fitz entered a room marked for radiation. They found the GH drug that would save Skye. Fitz rushed back to the lobby with it in hand as Coulson remained for a little while longer to find answers — answers he dreaded, but answers nonetheless.

He discovered the vault labeled TAHITI, and he discovered the alien corpse inside. This was that from which the GH serum was derived? This was the secret that lay behind his continued existence? He stumbled away from the grotesque, blue cadaver in shock.

A manila folder of documents was knocked off a small table when his unsteady arm leaned against it for balance. Papers spilled out of it and scattered across the floor. Alone in that harbor of atrocity and pressed for time, Coulson stopped for but a moment to look at the diagrams at his feet. Schematics for an artificial heart, a linearly actuated hand, and a hollowed-out spine full of fiber-optic cables: these were what he saw. Thrown for the largest loop of his life twice over in as many minutes, Coulson left the room without thinking to take anything with him. The door to the vault shut itself behind him.

He wandered the halls in a slow daze until Garrett found him.

——

Garrett and Triplett left on a high note.

Skye was alive, and she was recovering.

The origin of the drug which had saved her so miraculously weighed heavily on Coulson’s mind, but he was facing nearly a dead end along that line of investigation. The only means he could think of to get any answers about TAHITI was to pull in a favor from someone who might put him in contact with Director Fury - yet even that had to wait until a more opportune time.

On the bright side, everyone on his team was going to be okay, and the next most immediate issue facing them was choosing a location at which to refuel and resupply.

Desiring solitude and able for the first time in what felt like a long time to have it, Coulson sat down in his office and locked the door. The familiar environment, full of vintage spy gear and memorabilia, relaxed him. He could at last reflect on events at the Guest House with a clear head.

The first thing he did was pull out a mechanical pencil and three sheets of blank paper from a drawer. In the upper-right corner of the sheets, he wrote down the serial designation from each schematic that he had seen.

CG-8.6-V

MN-10.19-V

CB-33.0-V

The odds were against him finding any information about those names in SHIELD’s database, but it could not hurt to have them saved somewhere for reference.

After he had the designations marked exactly as he remembered them, Coulson laid graphite to paper once more, and he began to replicate the diagrams. The heart was illustrated in three views: top, front, and side. Each showed cutaways at strategic points to demonstrate internal valve mechanisms. Notes on dimensions and materials were laid out at the bottom of the page. Next came what was primarily an anatomical drawing of the bone structure of a right hand. It was, however, accompanied by the technical specifications of various components and the numbered locations where they might find use. Finally there was the third schematic: the fiber-optic cable carrier of a spine.

Coulson managed to get halfway through that final drawing before taking a good look at what he was doing. When he did, his stomach lurched for reasons that had nothing to do with the plane’s turbulence. He set down the pencil.

Every image lying on the desk before him appeared to be a perfect facsimile of those which he had seen in the facility.

His breathing hitched, and he became hyperconscious of the way the fingernails on his left hand were digging into his palm. He deliberately relaxed his posture only to immediately tense up again. He meticulously smoothed out the creases in the sleeves of his jacket. All the while, he could not tear his eyes away from his copied schematics.

Thinking quickly, Coulson checked his watch: a mere 26 minutes had passed since he entered his office. A shiver crawled down his back.

It was natural for a person to recall an intense situation very vividly, and everything that had occurred on the island certainly qualified for exactly that. What was unnatural — inexplicable except perhaps by a far-fetched theory that was very rapidly planting roots in his mind — was a newfound ability to replicate down to the last detail, in a timeframe shorter than what it took to write a half-assed mission report, a drawing that he had glimpsed for but a moment.

Coulson reflected on his experiences from a few hours ago, on everything from debarking the plane to engaging in combat to running through the halls of the Guest House. He realized with mounting dread that he could remember _everything_ that he had seen and heard and felt. If he tried, he could count the number of steps taken from the plane to the entrance of the base. He could gauge with what seemed like millisecond accuracy how much time passed between one event and another. He could quote word for word everything said by himself or by Fitz or Ward or Garrett within his hearing range.

He could quote word for word what was said by the soldiers guarding the facility.

_“I know you…” the man mumbled, “from the Garden…”_

Having that phrase brought to the forefront of his contemplation, Coulson latched onto those scant few words. They were important, this much he knew in the core of his being.

The garden.

What garden? Olive Garden? _No._

Coulson pulled open another drawer on his desk; he removed from it a flash drive whose casing was dark plastic and whose most recognizable feature was the red gleam of an apple-shaped sticker. This was Streiten’s flash drive. It felt small in the palm of his hand.

The Garden of Eden. But the dying soldier had asked, _“Are you…Virgil…?”_

Virgil, of Dante’s _Divine Comedy_. This was the answer that a drowsy part of his mind — a morsel of memory stirred loose by Raina’s machine — supplied.

He plugged the drive into his computer, and a dialogue box appeared. Its blinking cursor prompted for a password. With his fingers hovering over the keyboard, Coulson hesitated. Breathing deeply, he steeled himself. Then, he typed:

_PARADISO._

The dialogue box disappeared, and left in its place was a massive digital library of folders and documents under the heading of ‘PARADISE Program’. There were two main folders within the PARADISE directory, and these were labeled ‘Project TAHITI’ and ‘Project VIRGIL’.

Coulson opened the latter and skimmed through the first few files, which included an expanded version of his medical record. Said medical record referenced a number of brain scans and other non-intrusive examinations in addition to what he already knew of. Among VIRGIL’s documentation, there was nothing mentioned of Project TAHITI and very little of the Guest House. But both TAHITI and VIRGIL, in their familiarly clinical language, referred with great frequency to PARADISE. As the surfeit of frightful and unfamiliar information stood, it was actually some small measure of comfort that the two ethically dubious projects responsible for Coulson’s continued existence shared a connection through whatever the PARADISE program might be.

In the half-hour span that he invested into an initial overview of Doctor Streiten’s incomplete but still very revealing files, it was as if the ground below him turned into empty air. Detached, disoriented, and reeling, he freefalled; around him, the world seemed to spin in reverse.

Of course, these sensations were merely his own visceral reaction against the truth before him.

Technically speaking, on a SHIELD helicarrier before the Battle of New York, Phil Coulson had died. Technically speaking, in a secret SHIELD medical facility on a remote island, he had died again. Technically speaking, aboard a SHIELD aircraft and ensconced in the safety of an office decorated to his liking, Phil Coulson was still dead.

——

Because he desperately wanted to be proven wrong, Coulson snuck down into the plane’s medical bay. Skye was still isolated in that small bed, sleeping and recovering. Simmons was monitoring the girl’s vitals.

The biochemist noticed him enter.

“Sir,” she greeted him cordially, “Skye is still doing just fine.”

He responded, “I… I’m glad to hear that. Although, I’d also like to borrow the multi-spectral imaging setup if possible.”

“Of course…?”

The look on her face was pure confusion, but Simmons complied like the good subordinate that she was. After setting down her tablet, she strode over to a counter at the back of the lab. There, she unplugged a laptop. Lying atop of it, there was a pair of ordinary-seeming glasses.

When she handed it over to him, she inquired, “Might I ask what you need this for, sir?”

With the most chaste, uncomplicated smile that Coulson could muster, he answered, “I just want to see what’s broken in some of the old gadgets in my office.”

Simmons looked at him a bit oddly — a bit skeptically — but she seemed to mostly believe him. She returned to watching Skye without further questioning.

Coulson left.

Running into no one else, he made it back to his office without incident. He cleared his desk to make room for the laptop. With the touch of a button, the computer powered on. Coulson signed in and opened the application that Fitz had designed not too long ago. In a minute’s time, the program opened and synced itself with the glasses resting next to the laptop. The onscreen video feed showed a view of his office ceiling.

Before doing anything else, Coulson looked up from the machine to inspect his surroundings. He rose from his seat to check that the door was locked. Satisfied, he returned to his chair.

Coulson picked up the glasses with his left hand and pointed them at a ballpoint pen on his desk. He activated the imaging technology embedded in the frame. In the now-dusky screen of the laptop, Coulson saw the ghostly-pale silhouette of the inner workings of the writing utensil. Coulson reached for the pen only to drop it as if it were hot, startled by the not wholly unexpected appearance of his own hand through the x-ray spectrum.

There were white shapes approximating bones exactly where it seemed they ought to be, but the problem lay in the fact that these were not the only inner workings revealed. Where invisible nerves and muscle should have been on that screen there were instead very visible wires, servos, and sensors. Morbidly fascinated, Coulson rolled his wrist and straightened his fingers beneath the x-ray screen. He watched intricate mechanisms actuate fluidly and precisely and in perfect coordination to allow the rotation of his joints. The demonstration reminded him of the engineering marvel of Tony Stark’s Iron Man suits but for the protective plating peeled away.

He set the glasses back down on the desk, and he passed his left hand into their view. He found its internal makeup a perfect mirror of his right. In a moment of curiosity, he interlocked his fingers, and the blurry silhouettes of his digits meshed together to become indistinguishable from one another. Coulson’s hands were nothing but carefully wrought metal, his mind but intelligent design, his ability to move nought but clockwork in his limbs, but he could feel the warmth and pressure of skin on skin. As something constricted inside his chest, he questioned how.

——

“May,” he found her alone in the cockpit of the plane, and he said, “I need you to hit me.”

She turned to look at him, confusion evident, and she replied, “What?”

“Hit me.”

Her voice dropped into a lower register when she stated warningly, “Coulson.”

“I need you to put the plane into autopilot, get out of that chair, and hit me,” declared the man in complete seriousness.

May felt agitated and wary, but, with a brutal left hook, she did as ordered. Although the punch landed with a satisfying smack against her superior’s jaw, there was no joy derived from the act.

“Mmph!”

Catching his balance against the door, Coulson tenderly touched the spot on the side of his face where a bruise was sure to be forming. May quirked her eyebrows at him as if to ask if he felt happy.

Eyes downcast, he muttered quietly, “I have to wonder why that still hurts.”

May’s expression became one of worry for her friend.

——

Sitting in the copilot’s seat with miles of blue sky and bluer ocean stretched outside the windows, Coulson spoke at length about his terrible discovery. May occupied the pilot’s chair, which was turned to face him, and listened attentively. As he finished his tale, he flexed the fingers of his right hand, visualizing the blueprint sitting locked in his desk for a mechanical version — or rather, the very same version.

“An LMD. A Life Model Decoy. They taught a computer how to think like me and put it inside artificial skin. Am I still human? Am I a person?” he asked May, feeling hollow and utterly lost, “Am I even Phil Coulson?”

There came a pause that seemed to carry the weight of the world on its shoulders.

“... I don’t know, Phil,” she answered honestly, “I just don’t know.”

They both fell silent, empty of words.

He did not look up from the floor as May left the room; he did, however, stare blankly at her when she returned. She was toting a bottle of scotch and two glasses.

She set all three items down gently upon the console. She met his eyes, and she poured a splash of amber into a tumbler. Daylight filtered through the drink and the glass to scatter in tawny, haloed waves atop the aircraft controls. May slid the quarter-full tumbler in front of him and moved on to serve herself twice as much. He did not touch his drink, but watched as May picked up hers and swirled the liquid around in its container. The reflection of her fingers in the glass was warped, but her hands held steady.

If he were not emotionally exhausted, Coulson’s eyebrows might have climbed to reach for his hairline, but as the situation stood, the look on his face remained static, tired, and disillusioned as he dryly observed, “You’re the pilot.”

In response, she tipped back her glass, polishing off its contents in a single gulp. With the corners of her mouth curled into a faint smile, she retorted, “Please, Phil. I could fly this thing on a morphine drip.”

The corners of his eyes wrinkled with amusement, and he replied, “I wouldn’t dare to doubt it.”

Coulson took the glass that had been offered to him. He raised it to May, who poured herself another and returned the gesture. They drank, and, in silent companionship, they enjoyed the view beyond.

——

_Interlude._

Coulson asked Simmons for the data from his latest medical tests. She pulled up the information for him on one of the many tablets lying about the research lab. There were questions in her eyes, but she did not ask them. He scrolled through the numbers.

With the exception of his weight, which was an innocuous three pounds heavier than he remembered, everything matched exactly that of his last mandatory physical before New York. He thanked Simmons and left the device on the counter.

——

It was by pure chance that Coulson happened to encounter Fitz and Skye together in the lounge while they were discussing, of all things, the _Terminator_ franchise.

“They were made to look _exactly_ like humans. Or Arnold Schwarzenegger, at least. How are they not androids?” inquired Skye incredulously.

Fitz, with his scientific genius and his engineering background, stubbornly insisted, “Androids are also built to _function_ like people and to _act_ like them. If it can’t emulate emotions well enough to pass a Turing test, then it’s a robot, not an android.”

There was a significant part of Coulson’s psyche that wanted to either laugh or cry, and it simply could not settle on which.

The rest of him felt compelled to interject, “Did you know that Tony Stark has an AI?”

Skye whipped around and exclaimed in awe, “What? No!”

Beaming, Fitz enthused, “Yes, actually! I’ve heard a little bit about it, but there’s not much out there in the way of information. Wait,” His eyes widened in realization, and words spilled out of his mouth. “You were SHIELD’s liaison to Stark! What do you know about it? Did you ever get to meet it, sir?”

Chuckling at their excitement despite himself, Coulson replied, “Yes, I’ve met JARVIS. Several times, actually. He’s efficient and intuitive; he has a good sense of humor. Frankly, he’s preferable to Stark, and he knows it, too.”

Skye pointed out, “You talk about this AI like it’s a person.”

“Well,” Fitz responded with an acquiescent nod, “from an ethical standpoint, if it has memories and experiences and self-awareness, then we wouldn’t be right to treat it like it isn’t.”

Coulson felt something tighten in his chest. Would Fitz say the same if he knew?

“Hey, Coulson,” said Skye, “do you know if JARVIS was built to follow the three rules of AI?”

Fitz immediately argued, “Those’re actually full of paradoxes, but as far as crafting a fundamentally _good_ AI is concerned, they’re an excellent place to start thought experiments. And technically, they’re called Asimov’s three laws of robotics.”

“Yeah,” shrugged the grinning hacker, “Those things. Thou shalt not harm a human being, blah, blah, blah.”

An involuntary chill drew over Coulson as he flatly intoned, “JARVIS co-pilots the Iron Man suit. You can draw your own conclusions from that.”

During the next few days, he turned the unexpectedly enlightening conversation over in his mind every which way, poking and prodding at every interpretation that he could pull from it.

——

“Agent Ward,” asked Coulson contemplatively, “What do you think defines a good person?”

The answer came almost instantaneously: “Loyalty.”

——

_Turn, Turn, Turn._

Seated in the hard chair of the interrogation room after her line to Fury had been discovered, May maintained a mask of professionalism as Coulson stared at her with a look of wounded betrayal. She did not flinch as he stepped closer, and her stony gaze did not leave his face as he set three papers — sketches by his own hand, in one case of his own hand — down on the metallically cold table in front of her. He backed away again, his arms dropping loosely to his sides as he held them unnaturally still.

The accusation, knife-sharp and red-hot, lay thinly veiled behind Coulson’s bland statement of fact. “You knew.”

——

_Providence._

“Someone could be manipulating you,” insisted May gravely, “Director Fury was never in charge of TAHITI. He was never in charge of VIRGIL. He was never in charge of PARADISE. Who the hell knows what’s been programmed inside your head, Coulson?”

He had no answer to that, and this worried him as much as it did May.

“I’m sorry that PARADISE was kept from you,” she said tiredly, “but I won’t apologize for keeping an eye on you in all this. You need support, Coulson. People to have your back. That’s the truth.”

——

_The Only Light in the Darkness._

“No one gets to leave before orientation,” Koenig announced, tapping the lanyard that hung down from his neck. He cast a sidelong glance at Coulson and added, “Not even you, sir.”

Coulson’s session was conducted first of all of them.

Coulson strolled into the room exactly as he had strolled into Stark Tower and into a crater in New Mexico: without expectations. He had witnessed so many astonishing things within his lifetime that he had become, to a large degree, inured to technological marvels; the sight of the chair struck him as somewhat impressive nonetheless.

“It watches every heartbeat, every blink, and every other biometric we could think of. Fury wanted a lie detector that could beat Romanoff herself,” stated Koenig with the proud grin and keen enthusiasm of someone who had been waiting to show off for a very long time.

Briefly, an infernal concern whispered in Coulson’s mind that the chair, with its all-seeing sensors, might reveal his artificial condition. However, it was quickly silenced by the knowledge that of the many tests Simmons had run on him, not one had detected anything out of the ordinary. As far as over a dozen noninvasive procedures and a number of blood tests besides were capable of telling, he was perfectly, impeccably, profoundly, obscenely normal. It was with this private reassurance that he sat down in the device and allowed himself to be strapped in.

The back of the chair leaned forward slightly to adjust itself for his posture. A bright light blinked on and began shining directly into one eye, its intensity toeing the line of discomfort. Coulson found himself reminded of both dental exams and optometrist appointments.

Koenig observed the data feeds on the monitors before him and carefully enunciated, “Is your name Philip J. Coulson?”

“Yes,” responded Coulson simply.

“Tell me a truth about yourself, like your age or the color of your tie,” said Koenig with his eyes on the screens.

“My shoes are black.”

The caretaker of Providence base stated, “Good. Now tell me a lie.”

“I’ve never lost a bet against Maria Hill.”

There came a snort of amusement from Koenig, who quickly recomposed himself and then inquired, “Are you now or have you ever been affiliated with HYDRA?”

“No. I would rather die,” answered Coulson with blunt honesty.

Nodding, Koenig lifted his gaze from the monitors and met Coulson’s own. He crossed his arms. He straightened his spine. His mellow demeanor melted off of him more quickly than chocolate left out in the sun.

With gravity carved into his expression like words into stone, Koenig asked, “Are you aware that you’re an android?”

Coulson almost felt his heart skip a beat.

“I’m sorry, what?”

Koenig nodded with a self-satisfied smirk at some sort of indicator on his screen, and he imperiously intoned, “Well, that pretty much settles it.”

A hundred different questions, a thousand different thoughts, a whole spectrum of emotions from petrified fear to stomach-turning relief — all were racing through Coulson’s mind in a panicked frenzy, but he settled on a single response: “How did you know?”

Crossing his arms smugly, Koenig answered, “Fury didn’t tell me, in case that was your theory. I figured it out on my own. I happened to be a technician for the project before it was scrapped. Clearly, a lot of kinks have been ironed out since my time, but you have a couple ticks that are almost dead giveaways to a person in the know.”

“You worked on the PARADISE program?” queried Coulson, not believing his luck.

Koenig’s expression slackened into confusion, and he replied, “PARADISE? I don’t know the name. We just called it the LMD program.”

A measure of disappointment colored Coulson’s voice as he said, “I know about the LMD program. You weren’t aware that Fury had it revived?”

With a shake of his head, Koenig responded, “No, I wasn’t,” a frown slipped onto his face, and he groused, “We wanted to make better shields, better diversions. Not… all this.” He gestured toward Coulson from head to toe. For an instant, there was a spark of something much like pity in his eyes. Koenig candidly admitted, “Something like you was never the intention of the LMD program. I honestly don’t know what your existence means for… well, anything.”

“That makes two of us,” sighed Coulson.

With the press of a button, Koenig released the restraints of the interrogation chair. Raising his hand, he offered up a lanyard. Coulson looked at him in surprise.

Shrugging his shoulders, Koenig said, “If you want my advice, sir, don’t worry about it. We have bigger fish to fry at the moment. Whatever the future might hold, I, for one, will follow you to it.”

Abrasive demeanor or not, there was something touching about the man’s loyalty.

Then, Koenig added, “Oh yeah, and Fury’s alive, by the way.”

——

_Nothing Personal._

It was just the two of them in his office on board the Bus, but the familiar setting with its familiar smells and familiar furniture was of little comfort.

“How much did you know?” he asked Agent Maria Hill. “Just TAHITI?”

The other agent shook her head, replying, “No. Only a little bit more than that. I knew about most of PARADISE, but only the parameters. Never the details.”

“Why did you keep it secret? Why go as far as to rewrite my memories?”

With a guilty look, she answered, “I was told that it reduced the likelihood of errors.”

Coulson’s frown deepened, and he questioned, “The likelihood of errors?”

Clenching her hands at her sides defensively, Hill stated, “Yes, Coulson. Errors. Glitches. Problems that might arise as a result of you being put into a completely unfamiliar situation and your processing matrix not being able to handle it.”

Bitterly, he retorted, “Well, clearly that plan has gone out the window. But it should never have been necessary in the first place. I had a right to be informed! Maybe everything else is different, but my mind is the same as it ever has been.”

Which of them was he trying to convince?

She met his eyes coldly, and he found himself taken aback by her frigid expression.

“Is it, Coulson? Is it?” responded Hill jadedly, steel rising in her tone, “Because no one, not one doctor or technician or Director Fury himself, could tell me how much of you would still be _you_ after VIRGIL.”

Coulson was at a loss for words. He reached his hand out toward his longtime friend’s shoulder in an attempt to reassure them both. She glared at it and stepped away.

“Don’t touch me,” Hill’s voice cracked, emotional distress flooding into her speech as she accused him, “Are you even Coulson? Are your thoughts even thoughts, or are they only code simulating a dead man’s synapses? Is there something actually _experiencing_ all this inside that titanium skull of yours, or am I just talking to a learning algorithm that sees my friend’s memories?”

Gut-wrenching and breath-stealing and bloody, it felt to Coulson as if Loki’s scepter had stabbed through his heart all over again. Of all the people whose reactions he feared, Agent Hill had never been one of them. She was unflappable, reliable, steadfast. She was experienced with the strangest things the world had to throw at her, and she was almost as much a pillar of SHIELD as Fury. She had been involved in his resurrection. Of all the people who might be disturbed by his cybernetic condition, who might reject him, he had never expected her to be one of them.

Softly, he said her name, “Maria…”

“Don’t,” insisted Hill, “Just… don’t.”

She took a deep breath. He waited numbly.

Hill turned her head, and she explained to the wall full of decades-old trinkets, “I kept visiting you. After the last brain scan designated for VIRGIL, I never saw Fury come back into your room. But I kept visiting you. TAHITI brought you back; it couldn’t keep you with us. You were getting weaker, sleeping longer, feeling more pain. The doctors charted your — _his_ — degeneration for their records. Dying or not, it was _Phil Coulson_ in that hospital bed — that was undeniable. We reminisced, we argued, we complained about Stark. We watched movies. We talked circles around the fact that we both knew the end was coming for him.”

It was then that her eyes turned toward Coulson again. There was grief in them, a freshly reopened wound.

Addressing him directly, she lamented, “There was closure between us. And now, here I am, in front of you.”

He wanted to say her name again, to plead with her, but he could not bring himself to do so.

Grief taut in her voice and in the lines of her face, she finished her proclamation mournfully, “I’m sorry, but he and I… the two of us had conversations that you’ll never know. I was there when Phil Coulson died for the last time. I was his friend. And you’re not him.”

When she left the office, she took with her a piece of the foundation crumbling beneath his feet.

——

_“TAHITI is dangerous and risky for its patients’ mental health barring memory treatment...”_

_“...VIRGIL hasn’t been tested in humans yet, but based on the results of animal trials, I advise against proceeding…”_

_“...In conclusion, it is my recommendation that the PARADISE Program be shut down.”_

Coulson gaped blankly at his own paused face on the laptop screen. May watched him carefully.

How sick and twisted was it that he himself — or perhaps it should be the original Coulson — had overseen PARADISE? The TAHITI and VIRGIL projects had created him as he now existed — they were responsible for his current condition, for his very survival — and he remembered nothing of his involvement in them. Even his amnesia, his false memories of white sand and blue water and golden peace, was the meticulous work of his own hands. Was this reaping the seeds that he had sown? Lying in the bed that he had made? Was it karma? Was it fate? It was irony if nothing else.

When he finally made a sound to acknowledge the stunning turn of events before him, it came out simply as, “Huh.”

May informed him, “I found that flash drive in your empty grave. Fury told Hill that he buried PARADISE when he chose not to bury you.”

Because there came to mind no suitable response to such a statement and because the reminder of Maria Hill pained him, Coulson obliquely remarked, “I actually wanted to be cremated.”

——

_Ragtag._

Ward had turned HYDRA — rather, Ward had always been HYDRA.

It was a betrayal no one had seen coming, least of all Coulson, and it was a betrayal that hurt deeply for everyone. What a thing to have kept hidden from the people, from the supposed friends, with whom the ops specialist had lived for so long. Then again, a lot of things had been kept hidden on board the Bus. Skye had a personal agenda. Ward was HYDRA. May was Fury’s informant. Fury was alive. Too many secrets, too many bombshells, too many landmines. How was anyone meant to function in a team concealing so many skeletons?

How many dead bodies remained in the basement? There was at least one more, Coulson knew, and it was his own.

No more secrets, he decided.

Thus it came to pass that the most closely-held information of Coulson’s being was laid bare and vulnerable in a motel room before what remained of his team.

Fitzsimmons were sitting atop the thin blankets of one of the beds, a tablet shared between them. Skye was propped up on the other, her shoes still on her feet. Triplett had claimed the room’s only chair, which was located by the window, whose drapes were closed. A slant of sunlight escaped into the place anyway, and it fell over Triplett’s shoulder. May was leaning against the wall by the television, her expression inscrutable as always.

The air was dusty, the carpet was thin, and one of the wall lamps had a short in it. What an incongruous setting for a revelation of such magnitude.

Coulson threw onto Fitzsimmons’ bed three somewhat-crumpled drawings alongside a flash drive with a certain sticker on it. He looked around the room and met the eyes of every individual except May, who already knew the truth. Skye was attentive, Triplett was worried, and Fitzsimmons were curious. The two scientists had glanced at the items now lying next to them, but they refrained from picking them up for examination out of respect for whatever it was that Coulson had to say.

Clearly and deliberately, Coulson announced, “It’s time you all knew the truth about TAHITI. About PARADISE, really. There’s a lot more to how I’m standing in front of you than you realize. First of all, Fitzsimmons, the password for that flash drive is ‘paradiso’, all caps.”

With that implicit permission to start looking through what he had given to them, Simmons started rifling through his drawings as Fitz plugged the drive into his tablet. They might seem distracted, but Coulson knew the two of them were still listening.

He started his story from where it began: with an alien scepter through his heart and Nick Fury leaning over him as he died for the first time. He felt hyperconscious of the ridges of the (fake) scar on his chest and its companion on his back. He moved on quickly.

When he described the strange experiences that had tipped him off — the impossible dodging of Skye’s van door as it was kicked at him by Mike Peterson, the unusually sour scents of chocolate and of coffee, the lack of fatigue during long missions and later during treks through chilly, Canadian wilderness — his eyes could not help but dart from face to face in an effort to gauge the group’s reaction. When he arrived at his discoveries at the Guest House, both of the alien and of the Earth-shattering schematics in the vault, he noticed that Fitzsimmons had stopped reading the files on the tablet in order to give him their full attention. Professionally and detachedly, he described his replication of the schematics that he had seen for but a moment and his dread upon discovering his ability to mechanically recall events from his perspective. In the clinical manner of those faceless researchers who had worked under the PARADISE program, Coulson detailed the existential horror he experienced while reading Doctor Streiten’s files and the odd wonder of seeing through an x-ray screen the robotic articulations of his own hands.

He explained May’s role in keeping tabs on him for Fury. He explained how Eric Koenig had instantly recognized him as an LMD, tipped off by small behavioral quirks like not blinking enough and breathing too shallowly right after exertion, like standing unnaturally still, and like lacking facial flush after hiking through miles of snow.

At the point where Agent Maria Hill was to join the narrative, Coulson trailed off. Not even May yet knew what had passed between the two senior SHIELD operatives. He swallowed the lump in his throat; in SHIELD’s line of work, secrets were liable to get people killed. Here and now was the opportunity to shine a light into the darkest crevices of the past few months, to lay down all his burdens for at least a brief respite and to breathe freely. He wanted no secrets amongst the team members, but was this one, small privacy too much to ask?

With a shuddering exhale, Coulson skipped the retelling of his confrontation with Hill in favor of explaining what May had discovered beneath a headstone that bore his name. That was the end of it. One final secret, a secret that only half-belonged to him, would remain tied around his throat, something for him to hang himself with. Everything else — every twisted truth and fractured fact and disturbing detail that had knotted him up inside like a pretzel — he let go of.

“So then... VIRGIL was both the LMD project _and_ the name of the learning algorithm for personality emulation,” clarified Fitz.

Simmons tacked on, “And TAHITI was both the GH research and the memory treatment?”

“That’s right,” affirmed Coulson, “And even though I don’t remember it, I was in charge of everything under the PARADISE program.”

Triplett numbly commented, “...You should’ve come up with more acronyms.”

“Duly noted.”

“So…” said Skye in incredulous summation, “...You’re a robot.”

Fitz automatically corrected, “An android, technically.”

“Yes,” was his simple reply.

What else could he possibly have said to his team? Moreover, what would his team have to say to him? He looked at their faces, doubt and shock and amazement and conflict written plain across every feature.

He announced, “I’ll give you a little bit of time to digest this.”

As Coulson made for the door, he saw out of the corner of his eye Skye reaching out to stop him only for her to pause and retract her outstretched arm.

He shut the door to the motel room behind him, but not before he caught May saying to the team, “You need to understand that regardless of exactly _what_ Coulson is, he’s still the same _person_.”

Outside, it was a bright, sunny day with but a few small clouds on the horizon. The air smelled of asphalt from the busy road behind the next building over and of chlorine from the small pool below. There was no birdsong in the city but for the squawk of the occasional parking lot seagull and the chorus of motor vehicles. Wind did not rustle through tree branches; it blustered around the sharp corners of block-shaped buildings and blew unnaturally as cars rushed by in the pulse of morning rush-hour.

The metal railing, anchored in the cracked and weather-worn concrete of the second-floor exterior walkway, creaked like the aged structure it was when Coulson settled some of his weight on it.

Time passed. It was somewhere between twenty and thirty minutes. _27 minutes and 42 seconds._

Eventually, someone exited the room. The door shut again with a creak and a click. He was addressed.

“Coulson,” chorused a pair of voices in synchronicity.

Two someones, as it turned out. He found himself facing Fitz and Simmons with no one else in sight, not even May. In all likelihood, she was still arguing his case to Skye and Triplett.

A strong breeze blew stray locks of Simmons’s hair into her face. As she pulled it away, she said with her ever-kind smile, “Let’s talk inside the other room.”

Fitz used his room key to unlock the door to the next room over. He entered it, followed by Coulson and then Simmons. The blinds were closed here also. It was dark until one of the two scientists, or perhaps both of them, peeled the drapes open and let in the daylight. From the ceiling to the thinly carpeted floor, the place was identical to the room next door but for the people who occupied it.

Coulson, with his arms hanging limply at his sides, turned to face Fitz and Simmons.

“So,” he asked, anxiety barely concealed beneath a veneer of dry humor, “what’s the verdict? Am I a real boy?”

Fitz clapped his hands together once, announcing, “Believe it or not, sir, Simmons and I have actually had a lot of discussions about situations like yours.”

“Hypothetical situations, obviously,” said Simmons brightly, “and we could never seem to reach a conclusion—”

“—But with theory turned into practice—”

“—We’ve finally managed to decide on a concrete resolution to the matter,” finished Simmons.

There was a beat of silence. Coulson prompted, “And that resolution would be?”

“Well,” answered Simmons, “have you ever heard of Poe’s law?”

“No,” was Coulson’s response.

Fitz rapidly explained, “It’s the idea that, when you’re online, you can’t tell apart the parody of an extreme opinion and the honest expression of an extreme opinion unless there’s some sort of indicator. Sarcasm doesn’t translate.”

Simmons elaborated, “That’s it, more or less. The central conceit of Poe’s law is that, after a certain point, the _mimicry_ of something and the _actual_ thing become impossible to distinguish from each other. They are, for all purposes, the same thing.”

Frowning, Coulson stated, “I don’t follow.”

“What we mean to say,” responded Simmons more deliberately and delicately, “is that while you may not be physically human anymore, you are still Phil Coulson.”

“That’s what Simmons and I believe, at least,” hastily tacked on Fitz, “The others’ll come around eventually.”

It was everything that Coulson had ever hoped and ever feared to hear, yet he could hardly accept the fact of it. Acceptance, despite everything. Despite the murkiness surrounding his revival, despite his unconventional place under the umbrella of the living, despite his own reservations — his own inability to fully accept himself in the present.

He had not looked at Doctor Streiten’s files again since the day he had puzzled out the password ‘PARADISO’. No matter the relevance of the information to him, no matter the importance, he had simply never been able to muster up the will to do it. On a visceral level, he dreaded the thought of staring into the face of that all he really was, of gazing into the black mirror that peeled back his skin. Was it because of cowardice? Trauma? Loathing? All of the above? It was irrational, if nothing else. Irrational, pernicious, and _human_. In an unraveling world, he clung tightly to that.

In the midst of such morbid contemplations, Coulson was pulled back to reality by the chime of Simmons’s voice.

“It’ll take weeks, if not months, to gain a full understanding of how your systems work,” she said, “but would you like to know what we’ve learned so far?”

He nodded.

This marked the start of a long discussion between the three of them in which Fitzsimmons bounced a lot of theories off of each other and Coulson absorbed the information. The content of their teachings was split nearly fifty-fifty between medical and mechanical themes. One minute, all talk was about nerves and the sensation of pain; the next, Fitz was trying to put into layman’s terms the importance of the laws of thermodynamics in touchscreen sensitivity.

Skeletons; physics. Equilibrium; gyroscopes. Adenosine triphosphate; electricity. Brains; computers. Biotech.

All of the science related back to him, and for the first time, Coulson found himself feeling grounded in it rather than lost.

——

_One day, months or years in the future, when Coulson finds himself doubting the worth of his artificial life, Simmons will remind him of their conversation in a motel room at the lowest point in all of SHIELD’s considerable history._

_With both scientific authority and childlike enthusiasm, she will proclaim, “What I still find most fascinating is that you have_ real _bone marrow generating real cells — either your original or a clone of it grown in a lab, I don’t know which. But it’s why all those blood tests I conducted never caught anything unusual. When you bleed,” she will pause before finishing, “it’s… human.”_

——

Skye and Triplett were not so accepting, so embracing, as Fitzsimmons had been. They met him with wariness, confliction, doubt. But they were not condemning, not angry, not fearful. Simply neutral — neutral, and hurt at having been kept in the dark.

“This whole thing is… weird,” said Triplett with a grimace, “but I still got your back against HYDRA.”

Placing a hand on his shoulder as she coasted by to grab her laptop, Skye quirked an awkward smile at him. She softly declared, “It’ll take some getting used to, AC. But we’re cool.”

The younger generation of SHIELD operatives, after a few moments of chatter, left the room to steal a late breakfast from the vending machines. They were certainly also going to discuss their thoughts about him — but the worst was already over, the band-aid ripped off. It would simply be a matter of adjustment.

Coulson and May were left in relative privacy indoors. He looked at her knowingly, and she looked at him the same.

Putting his hands in his pockets in a show of nonchalance that both of them knew was hollow, he asked, “What did you say to them?”

She replied, “The truth.”

“That being?”

“You need backup.”

——

At Cybertek, while he and May were passing themselves off as ex-SHIELD scientists, Coulson could not help but wonder. He wondered what the company representatives before him, the people who had created Deathlok, would think if they knew what he was beneath the surface. He wondered what they would do to him, what they would do with him, if only they knew.

Would they take him apart? Reprogram him? Reverse-engineer the technology that preserved his mind? All of the above applied to the Deathlok program? The possibilities were troubling, to say the least.

These dark thoughts lingered long after he and May shoved a filing cabinet out of a window and made their escape from the facility.

——

_Beginning of the End._

Coulson and Skye bumped into each other in the halls of the new Cybertek facility. In that concrete bunker, underneath the fluorescent lights and among the newly-freed victims of the “Incentives Program”, they stopped. In that empty intersection, the two of them greeted each other with smiles thinned by the exhaustion that comes after success.

“Hey, AC.”

“Hello, Skye.”

“All good on your end?”

“Fine and dandy,” replied Coulson. “Just a few things I’ll have to check on for peace of mind after I meet Agent May. She has Grant Ward keeled over down that way.”

He gestured toward the way he had been headed.

Gaining a lively, vengeful gleam in her eyes, Skye announced, “I saw Mike Peterson going for the side exit. Ace is being taken care of out there.”

Coulson had meant to speak with Mike for some time now. He gave Skye a nod that was half-acknowledgement and half-agreement: they swapped. Skye went to find May and Ward; Coulson went outside.

The air was cool and dry. It tasted faintly of pollution. In the distance, there came a clamor of voices. People were being rescued from the Cybertek facility and reunited with their families.

He found Deathlok standing atop an untamed hillside. With both his natural and cybernetic eyes, the would-be superhero fixed from afar a longing stare at the young boy being wrapped in a blanket by responsible government employees. Every few moments, Ace would glance at the doors of the building or around the parking lot, hoping to find someone who did not want to be found. Unanchored, adrift, helpless — there was a look on Mike’s face that spoke of guilt and shame, a hollowness to his cheeks that marked uncertainty of everything except the fact that he no longer belonged. Coulson recognized those things; he knew them well twice over.

Whether or not Ace’s father would ever return to him could very well depend on the events of the next few moments.

Taking slow, casual steps toward the cyborg who had, not all that long ago, been attempting to murder him, Coulson remarked, “You could go to Ace, you know. We wouldn’t stop you.”

Mike never tore his gaze away from his son, but he shifted a nervous half-step and hunched his shoulders in a way that made it clear that he was hyperconscious of the state of his body, uncomfortable in his own skin. Bitterly, he scoffed, “Like this? I’m a monster.”

“Your son doesn’t care what you look like, Mike—”

“It’s not just what I look like, it’s what I’ve done.”

“Do you think he blames you?”

Hesitating only briefly, Mike answered, “... No. But I blame me. And I’d be terrible for him the way I am now. My face is horrific — the stuff of nightmares. Half of me is metal and made to kill.” Mournfully, he turned toward his companion and lamented, “Agent Coulson, I’m not human anymore.”

Miraculously, Coulson knew exactly how to respond.

“You think you’re not human anymore?” snapped the agent. “Mike, you have a heart and a brain, and you’ve gotten plenty of mileage out of both. When you breathe, your lungs fill with oxygen that your body actually needs. You would drown if you were at the bottom of the ocean; you would starve if you didn’t have food; if I shot you in the chest with a big enough gun, you would die. To paraphrase Simmons: when you bleed, it’s human enough. Your feelings aren’t invalid, and your pain isn’t worth less than anybody else’s.”

Mike seemed startled by his fervor. Coulson found that he, too, was surprised at himself.

Stubborn despite everything, Mike insisted, “Thanks for trying, Agent. But you don’t know what it’s like to be me.”

Coulson let out huffy sigh. Then, he stated gravely, “True. I don’t have a son. I haven’t been exactly in your shoes. But I know what it’s like to be made into something else.”

He received a skeptical look from Mike.

“Have you ever taken a good look at me with that multi-spectral imaging eye of yours?”

The other man shook his head. Negative.

“Do it now.”

Half-heartedly, Mike turned his focus fully onto Coulson. The wide-eyed astonishment that entered his face made it clear that he was seeing what the agent had invited him to see.

“My God,” exclaimed Mike. “You… you’re… some kinda robot? An android?”

Tension roiling in his joints, Coulson intoned, “Yes. For as long as you’ve known me.”

“But… how?”

He responded, “SHIELD. The details get complicated and classified fast, but long story short goes that I was dying. They decided to save me — or a copy of me, at the very least.”

There must have been some hitch in his voice or some vitriol in his tone, because Mike recognized his resentment. With tentative compassion creeping in, he asked, “Did you want to be saved?”

Slowly, Coulson shook his head. “No.”

Mike nodded in sympathetic understanding. Then, he inquired, “Do you have anybody you care about? From before?”

A cello playing long into the night. A flash of scarlet hair and dark humor. An arrow inexplicably embedded in the ceiling.

“Yes.”

“Have you gone to them? … Do they know?”

His silence was all the answer that was required.

Mike chuckled mirthlessly, “See, you understand. Much as I want to, I can’t go back. Too much is different. And for me, there’s a lot to set right — for his sake.”

Deathlok turned away and marched off. Coulson made no move to follow him. He had known people whose pasts haunted them, people with red in their ledgers — and he knew there was no righting their wrongs for them. SHIELD could keep an eye on Mike Peterson, but he would ensure that they would also give the man the space that he needed. Meanwhile, Coulson had his own scores to settle.

——

An imposing, night-clad figure stood in the middle of the plane’s lounge area. This was, of course, Nick Fury, whose dark and stormy personage was practically the antithesis of the brightly lit, cozy environment around him. Coulson glared at him in vexation as he paced back and forth, ranting all the while.

“That was stupid! And cruel — and stupid!”

Fury remained immobile but for his one-eyed gaze, which stalked Coulson’s movements with grim, dogged focus. Like a mud soldier, like a sand dune, like a current in the uncharted depths of the Pacific Ocean, he silently absorbed the verbal blows thrown at him by his right-hand man and rolled with the anger that drove them.

“It was lousy what you did!” railed Coulson, who threw his arms wide in challenge. “You knew that I didn’t want TAHITI, that I wanted to die — and you wouldn’t let me. Even when TAHITI was failing, you couldn’t leave me alone. Instead, you threw me into VIRGIL!”

Fury did not nod, did not twitch, did not respond at all. He only continued to watch and listen.

“I had that program shut down before it got to the human experimentation phase. Hell, I had TAHITI shut down after. The Guest House — the entire PARADISE Program — was buried under _my_ recommendation. And you dug it up just to put me through those torture chambers.”

He made a few silent laps in his pacing, but in the quiet it was clear that more accusations remained. His breathing was sharp and shallow, his hands were clenched into fists, his posture was agitated. Suddenly, Coulson stopped pacing. He whirled around to face Fury. He took three long strides toward the supposedly dead director.

He said blithely, “You know what bothers me most? More than all the other shit involved in this?” Coulson gestured toward all of himself. “Director Fury, you messed with my head. My memories. My mind, if you can even call whatever I have now a mind. I get that the whole “magical place” schtick was TAHITI’s work — it was probably my idea in the first place, right? — but everything else in my head? VIRGIL?” He breathed. “I have no idea how real it is. How real _I_ am. For all I know, I’m just a predictive simulation of the lucky guy that Loki personally stabbed through the heart.”

Coulson took a deep breath. He exhaled. “Nick… Who am I? What did you turn me into? And, for the love of everything that SHIELD is supposed to represent, _why_?”

“Why?” In that slow, measured cadence that was reserved only for those whom he respected, Fury answered, “You’ve known me a long time, Phil. You know I play the long game. And in the long game, you matter.” Not missing a beat, he declared, “Agent, I moved heaven and earth to bring you back. Hell if I care whether or not you dream of God-damned electric sheep. You’re alive, human or android, alive — and you’re Phil Coulson, Agent of motherfucking SHIELD.”

Coulson tried to protest, but Fury interrupted by tossing a cube-shaped paperweight at him. A hand shot out and snatched it from the air with inhuman speed and precision before he even fully registered the presence of the projectile. Yet another example of proof that he was a Life Model Decoy.

For its size, the cube had heft. Cradled in the palm of his hand, its ridged texture reminded him of the surface of a basketball. He looked at the small box in puzzlement.

Fury was watching and waiting. When Coulson raised his eyes to Fury’s own, he turned his hand outward to display the inert cube, inquiry implicit.

——

“What is that thing?” questioned May not long after Fury departed. Although she liked being the sole occupant of the cockpit just fine, she had to admit that having Coulson in the copilot’s seat was not terribly bothersome.

“Fury’s Toolbox,” responded Coulson, who distractedly fidgeted with the cube.

She crossed her arms. “And that means?”

He looked at her and stated flatly, “I’m the new Director of SHIELD.”

Hardly reacting but for a raising of her eyebrows, May took this announcement in stride. She turned her gaze out the window, where blue skies above and cloud cover below greeted her like the familiar friends that they were.

After a moment of contemplative silence, Coulson further elaborated, “Fury showed me how the Toolbox works. It’s a computer and a database — _Fury’s_ database.” The corners of his mouth quirked upward into a dry smile. “This box contains everything that SHIELD has ever known. That includes, supposedly, _all_ of the PARADISE files and not just ‘the twenty motherfucking percent’ that Streiten stole.”

May’s eyes crinkled. “His choice of phrasing, I assume.”

“Through and through,” chuckled Coulson.

They lapsed into quietude once more.

May glanced at him. Leaning back in his chair and staring outside as he was, he seemed relaxed, yet Coulson’s mind was clearly elsewhere.

She asked, “Something still on your mind?”

Coulson looked askance at the Toolbox gripped in his left hand.

Softly, he said, “There’s a special file in this thing. I haven’t opened it yet, but he called it the ‘key’ for unlocking access to… to my operating system and to my restricted programming. God, it feels so weird to say that.” Simultaneously exasperated and disconcerted, Coulson continued, “Anyway. Somewhere in the plethora of experimental programs apparently locked inside my head, there’s supposed to be one that can recover my wiped memories.”

“That’s what you’ve been looking for this entire time,” replied May with her own, tightly restrained brand of enthusiasm showing in her voice. She then read his somber mood. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong. It’s just… there’s something else here, too. Something… not what I expected. Put the plane on autopilot.”

She did as told. Then, she directed her full attention to Coulson.

He pressed his fingers against the sides of the Toolbox, activating it. He set it on the dashboard. A single holographic screen appeared, and its entirety was filled by a still-frame of paused video. The still-frame image? Coulson himself, sitting at a table, with the SHIELD logo stamped on the wall behind him.

May’s brow became furrowed.

The video was rewound and started from the beginning.

——

_A hand pulls away from the camera and settles next to a small glass of water. Both belong to Coulson, who is seated at a table. He appears tired and resigned but also… happy._

_Coulson claps his hands together once._

_“Hi. I hope that whatever circumstances surround us watching this message aren’t world-endingly bad. As a recap of what we hopefully already know: the PARADISE Program got rebooted, and we were the first person in history to go through both branches of it. Also the first human subject of VIRGIL. Yay, us. I hope we tell Fury off again. When I got the rundown, I gave him a whole spiel about consent and ethics and the morality of making… well, you. Still pretty proud of that speech.”_

_He clears his throat._

_“Anyway. As of this recording, it’s been two weeks since the final scan for VIRGIL — for you — was taken. Two weeks since I was recruited into the project all over again. TAHITI burned all our memories of overseeing PARADISE except for the occasional moment of deja vu, but the reports and records have our fingerprints all over them. I’ve basically picked up where we left off. Except, officially, I’m only a consultant. A consultant who bosses people around and gets veto power over almost every decision, but still a consultant. Apparently, dying on the job merits a major demotion.”_

_He laughs dryly but stops abruptly._

_“I know that we’re against this. We shut this place down. But you, VIRGIL — you’re happening no matter what I say. Fury’s making sure of it. I might as well have a hand in it so that you turn out alright. You could say that I have a personal investment.”_

_Coulson sighs._

_“Maria hates what they’re doing here. I haven’t told her that I’m involved, but maybe I should. It might make it easier for her to get used to you later. Then again, maybe closure is the right thing to give her. I don’t know. She’ll need space when I’m gone. She’s top of the list of people Fury’s scoping out to be your handler, but I don’t think it would be good for her. I’ll give him a different recommendation the next time he calls — we know some agents who could stand to get out of the office for a while, don’t we?”_

_He grows quiet and contemplative._

_“The way I see it, you and I are the same person up to a certain extent, and that extent was two weeks ago. Now, we go our separate ways. I’m dying. You’re not. Hard to say which of us is the lucky one… but if SHIELD needs somebody to steer things right, I’m glad that we’ll be it.”_

_Coulson stares directly into the camera as he raises a glass of water as if in toast._

_“It’s a brave new world, Agent Coulson. There’s still good work to be done. Best of luck.”_

——

_Epilogue._

Coulson parked the rental car on the side of the street. The sedan was beige and it smelled stale inside, but it did the job just fine. He exited the vehicle, taking with him a small, unadorned picnic basket. The early morning sun caught him in its golden glow, but the glare was no problem at all with his sunglasses on. Very few people appeared to be around, which, given that it was 7 am on a university campus during break, made a fair amount of sense. The only other individual whom Coulson saw out and about was a groundskeeper. The groundskeeper was clipping hedges on the other side of a fence. With the name Stan sewn over the chest pocket of his jacket, the old man gave Coulson a sideways stare as he walked by but said nothing. Not usually one for self-consciousness but perturbed by Stan’s gaze, Coulson straightened his tie.

When he reached the lawn of the largest building on campus, Coulson crossed the green. Dew clung to his shoes and dampened his socks by the time that he made it to the opposite end of the well-manicured space. A few sparse trees dotted the lawn’s boundary there, along with a single, short, fat stump that probably would have been removed already if it had not proven so popular a gathering place among staff and students alike.

Coulson set his picnic basket down in the grass next to the stump.

For a few moments, he remained standing. He contemplated the stump, that last remnant of what was once quite an impressive willow tree. In the shade of that willow, he himself had frequently sat when he had been a student pursuing a history major at the very same university. How strange and exciting it had been when Fury scouted him out for SHIELD enlistment there. The campus had been a few acres and several coffee shops smaller back then. How quickly times changed.

He sat down on the stump and stretched his legs out. He removed his shoes and socks, and he set both neatly aside. The grass felt cool and soft between his toes.

Idly, he wondered if any of his remains still occupied the dirt below him. Maybe it had been a windy day when Fury had spread his ashes here. They might have all blown away and been scattered across the entire college green. Or maybe it had been rainy, and his ashes had been soaked into the ground. In the end, he supposed that it did not matter. The location was the important thing.

The lid of the picnic basket was flipped open by gentle fingers. Coulson reached a hand inside and pulled out a fat-bottomed, flute-necked bottle of dark whiskey. This was set down behind him. Coulson then proceeded to remove from the basket not one but two drink glasses. He lay them both next to the whiskey. Next, he uncapped the bottle, and he portioned out two equal measures of its contents. Once finished, he resealed the whiskey and returned it to the basket on the ground. With the greatest of care and solemnity, Coulson picked up the first glass and turned forward to hold it over his knee. The second, he left alone. Resting regally as the sole occupant of the stump’s other half, it remained undisturbed behind him.

Coulson raised his drink in silent tribute. Sinking his heels into the grass, he savored the firmness of the earth beneath his feet.

**Author's Note:**

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